AOL interested in purchasing Yahoo

Yahoo shares surged as high as $17 today before fading after the WSJ reported last night that the Internet portal company AOL was interested in purchasing it.

In 2008, Microsoft offered $47.5 billion for Yahoo, but the company snubbed the offer.

Today, Yahoo's market cap is under $22 billion and any takeover would command a smaller price than what Microsoft offered just two years ago.

Because AOL can not afford the takeover solo, the company is teaming with specialty firms Blackstone and Silver Lake, known for taking over companies whose stock has fallen out of favor with the market.

Originally posted by KillerBug: AOL needs to die already...they are the blockbuster of internet access.

Can I quote you on that one? Though I think it is more fitting that Blockbuster is the AOL of movie rental. AOL has been screwing up far longer than Blockbuster. BB is just going in to chapter 11, AOL was there 15 yrs ago. AOL is like the terminator you can rip off its arms and legs but it will continue to make stupid mistakes.

Yeah...you can quote me on that. Blockbuster has been screwing up since 1990 at least; that is when they lost my business forever because they claimed that I never returned a game that I never rented to begin with...a game for a console I didn't even have. They demanded that I pay them almost $200 for late fees, plus another $120 for the game itself or else I could not rent anymore. I found the game on the shelf...so they claimed that they had purchased another copy. Needless to say, I never rented there again. I hear many stories like this...I guess charging $7 for a 3-day rental just wasn't making them enough money to buy a private island made completely of cocaine.

At least AOL has a few valuable assets...blockbuster is just blockbuster. They had a lot of money once...but it has drained away, and now all they have is a toxic brand name that no one in their right mind would accept for free. Then again, it seems AOL is quickly selling off all their quality assets...ICQ was the best part of AOL and it is gone now. Before long, they will only retain their own toxic brand name.

BB never screwed me over. Actually quite the reverse. I usually don't even get late fees when I am late. A few yrs ago they dole out customer service in proportion to how much you rented from them in the past. Since I have rented an insane number of videos, I am in the 'don't piss off this guy club'. I owe some of those to an incompetent clerk who was probably going to get fired at his next big mistake which was me. I was getting the unlimited rentals one at a time for $20 and the fool set me up for 3 for like $35. I told him I wasn't going to pay that and after arguing for a while wanted to see the manager. Apparently you can't change the order past a certain spot (good thinking BB). He had some coupon that dropped the 3 from 35 down to 3 for 25. A agreed if he made it for 3 months. Buy the end of that I had seen every movie 'in the core' that I wanted to see. I was a slave to the movie going through over 400 movies in that time period. Then I joined the mail order that gave me 3 per week plus 1 free store rental. I kept that up for years until the Red Box came out. I had at least 100 before that 3 month period since I had rented unlimited 1 at a time for a few months. I know when I brought in something late they would check my total and do a double take. I suspect I am over 1000 and the double take is to check the digits. Then they waived my late fees.